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Noob: My first try - WIP

Hello, wonderful Cartographer's Guild!

This is my first post here. Like many others, I guess, I found this great forum searching for map making tools/software/tutorials. I use some of my free time to slowly build a world for a fantasy novel thingy I'm planning, and the time has come to start making some good maps of what's in my head. Drawing by hand isn't my greatest skill, therefore I sought to do it digitally instead.

There aren't many placenames yet, and I haven't yet totally figured out how to easily add/remove features like mountains and hills, but it's getting close to my vision now. The western mountains should be more like a contiuous mountain range, but it doesn't quite look like that yet.

Also, some of the rivers are probably illogical, and there are too few lakes, but I'm slowly working on that. Geography's a bitch

Anyhow, this is my first serious attempt at a map like this, again huge thanks to Ascension! There's a lot to do yet, but some feedback from you inspiring and skillful folks would be appreciated

And it's made with Photoshop CS2 and a mouse.

Any ideas on how to easily add/edit terrain/mountains? Most of the mountains are made with (difference) clouds (see the tutorial), and are therefore somewhat random. The tutorial I used showed how to easily move mountains around, and that helped, but if anyone has better ideas, I'd be happy

Hey, how ya doin. The way I do it is to use the Lasso tool, set the feather between 50-100 (top left of screen), lasso up a nice lookin chunk of mtns and then use the move tool to move them where I want them. If you want some more then do a new layer of clouds, diff clouds, diff clouds, light effects, delete the darks, lasso up some chunks, move into place, then merge down. Of course you could get more squirrely lookin mtns by doing more diff clouds or you could get some rather bulbous mtns by just using clouds without the diff clouds (I did this in my Narthaine map).

If you want some different style of mtns then try Pasis' tut called Rising Up The Mountains, or try Steel General's two tuts (one is still in the experimental stage). Both of these methods use multiple layers and patterns to produce mtns...Pasis' is more artsy and Steel's is more photo-realistic. There are many tuts in that forum section for mtns so if none of those grab ya then you know enough now to start experimenting and maybe we can all copy from you

As for your map, I think it looks good but I think that you might have the blend modes on the mtns mixed up...the layer itself is set to hard light and the color overlay of brown is set to soft light. But, if that's the way you want it then that's cool too. Keep on keepin on.

If the radiance of a thousand suns was to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One...I am become Death, the Shatterer of worlds.
-J. Robert Oppenheimer (father of the atom bomb) alluding to The Bhagavad Gita (Chapter 11, Verse 32)

I figure I'll do what Steel did for me, way back when I made my first post (way back...in April ). Repped!

"Unless I'm allowed to carry around a gun to shoot their giant killer-spiders, Australia needs to stay the hell away from me. Also Australians, who if they have lived this long are obviously agents of the spiders and not to be trusted."

A thing you may want to look into is making the borders follow natural borders - rivers, forest edges, mountains and such. Unless of course, you have a reason for having your borders where they are - in that case, disregard me